For in sacrifice you take no delight
Burnt offering from me you would refuse
My sacrifice a contrite spirit.
A humbled, contrite heart you will not spurn.
My dear brothers and sisters, these words from Psalm 51, verses 16 and 17, offer a very useful key to unlock the mysteries of the great feast of Corpus Christi – the Body and Blood of Our Lord – that we are celebrating today.
Reflecting on the words “You are a priest forever, in the line of Melchizedek” the response to the psalm we just sang, Saint Augustine, great doctor of the Church, teaches, “that is to say, not after the order of Aaron, for that order was to be taken away when the things shone forth that were intimated beforehand by these shadows.” In other words, according to Saint Augustine, David was prophesying the end of the system of sacrifices of the Jewish temple, officiated by the priestly order of Aaron. He was rejecting current customs, and foreseeing future ones, where another priesthood, one after the order of Melchizedek, was to be instituted. Like Melchizedek, who, as we learned from the first reading, offered a sacrifice of bread and wine, this priesthood would similarly offer bread and wine. We can see now that this new sacrifice, and the new form of worship, was, as Saint Paul wrote in the first letter to the Corinthians which we just read, that of Our Lord instituting the offering of his own humbled and contrite heart in the form of bread and wine.
Recall the words, dear brothers and sisters, of St. Paul to the Phillipians (2: 7b-8):
being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
It was so that we could offer our own human hearts, so often so hard, that proper and full contriteness is difficult, that Our Lord took up our nature and then possessed of a human body, offered a humble and contrite human heart as the perfect sacrifice to God. He was humbled not merely in his taking on human flesh, but had his heart broken – another way to understand contrition – through the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, the abandonment by his disciples, the cruel treatment that he suffered at the hands of his torturers.
My dear brothers and sisters, today we celebrate a miracle that took place two millennia ago, and by divine will takes place every day and at every Catholic altar, the heart of Our Lord, His Most Precious Body and Blood, is offered by to the Father in the form of bread and wine.
And this heart that is offered is not a symbolic heart, my dear brothers and sisters, but a true, real heart. I would like to direct your attention to the work of Dr. Franco Serafini, a cardiologist from Bologna, Italy, who has dedicated his life to examining Eucharistic miracles. Of the five Eucharistic miracles that Serafini examined closely, he was able to identify four common features:
“five times out of five: [one finds] the presence of the heart, of myocardial tissue, and suffering myocardial tissue. Then we have blood, of course. And then we have a blood type. It is the AB blood type, the blood type that is also found in authoritative Passion clothes such as the Shroud of Turin.”
Bear in mind, of course, that not every consecrated host need display this bio-physical feature, since it is the substance of the bread that is transformed into the Body and Blood of Our Lord, and not its external features that remain as they are. It is to offer proof to those who doubt, and touch their hearts, that Our Lord will sometimes deign to offer us a Eucharistic miracles. Indeed, this great feast we celebrate today was the Church’s response to a Eucharistic miracle in Bolsena, Italy, in 1263.
Through our ingestion of this most Sacred Heart of Jesus, my dear brothers and sisters, our own hearts become like His, becoming the humbled and contrite heart that can be offered as acceptable worship of God. In this way, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, makes us – all of us – “a kingdom and priests to serve our God” (Rev 5:10), priests in the order of Melchizedek.
To be a priest, dear brothers and sisters, is to offer sacrifice and blessings. One of the lines of the English translation of Tantum Ergo St. Thomas Aquinas’ great contemplation of the Blessed Sacrament, reads:
Here is new and perfect worship
Brothers and sisters, this is the challenge for us, on this feast day, to make sure that our worship is perfect. It is when our worship, of Our God, in the Blessed Sacrament is new and perfect, that our service of our brethren will be new and perfect – offering them not curses but blessings, and not selfish acts but sacrifices. It is through new and perfect worship that the rivers of the New Jerusalem, whose arrival we await, will flow.
(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the anticipated mass on 21 June 2025 at the Sé Catedral, Old Goa.)
(Image reference: Detail from “Allegory of the Eucharist,” Alexander Coosemans, between 1641 and 1689, Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, via Word on Fire.)
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